Blessed by the Potato

First, from a conversation with Bug earlier today:

There’s a paradox, maybe you can help me with…
If Pi is infinite, that means that logically, EVENTUALLY it HAS to repeat, thus making it not infinite.

Ah, not true.
Consider a number with the following pattern:

3.14114111411114111114

It may have segments that look like repeats of previous segments, but at no point can you circle a bit and say “now the rest is just this part over and over”. The pattern may be apparent, but it’s not actually the same thing over and over, no matter how far out you go. It can be infinite without being degenerate… that’s what makes it transcendental.

I got ya… but infinite… man… that’s infinite. Doesn’t it have to repeat eventually? I mean if it goes on forever? [comment: this is more of a philosophical aside on Bug’s part, and actually came between these two quotes] It’s like… if the universe is infinite, the molecules have to line up exactly the same as they are here somewhere far away, thus making a duplicate of this world, and if that happens and it’s infinite, then there are infinite parrallel worlds.

No, because as long as it goes on, it has an infinite number of ways to remain unique (an infinite number of digits, and 10 different ways to fill each slot).

Infinite just means never-ending, not necessarily all-encompassing.

Consider a circle. Draw a smaller circle just inside. And other smaller circles (or if you prefer, Russian dolls) within. You can keep going on with an infinite chain of progressively smaller circles, but they all still fit within the finite space of your first one.

Some even more simple math to ponder. Right now my server is consuming something like 75 W of power (since the drives aren’t being taxed and all that. The power supply is rated to 220 W, but it’s just running low-processor intensive things. Doesn’t even do any drive seeks from what I hear). That’s 75*24*30 = 54 kWh used in a month. At about 5 cents/kWh, it’s costing me about $2.70/month to run. It is a bit of a pain, as I experienced earlier today; since it’s a crappy old system that I don’t much mind opening up to the ravages of the internet, it needs to be reset every 4-7 days, or it’ll just run itself in circles until there’s no more memory left and lock up. That’s a minor annoyance, but it also means that if I ever go on vacation for more than a week, I can expect my webpage to stop serving itself before I get back.

The main goal of this setup was to give myself unlimited access to the Apache, MySQL, and PHP tools I’d need to get a site up and running, and I have partially done that — I actually haven’t learned much in the way of useful things, more about how to get the programs themselves running. Anything I’m using is a pre-written script. I still have no idea how to properly set up a MySQL database or access it via PHP. But that’s beside the point, as far as hosting my webpage goes, I think I know enough about WordPress and the other software to be able to use a real host. Based on the costs/pain in the butt, ideally I’d like to find a host in the ~$6/mo range (that is, that’s the price point where I think it would be better to switch to a real host rather than what I have now). So far the lowest I’ve seen is ~$10 CDN (aside from the free ones, which may yet be an option). Let me know if you have any recommendations, and I’ll also say I have no problem giving referrals if your service has a promotion for them. (Likewise, if anyone is moving and setting up a new Rogers account, feel free to tell them I referred you so I get a free month :)

Do you have a working fire extinguisher? It might be a good gift idea for the person who has everything. I got one for my parents (and one for myself) last year. They’re reasonably cheap (starting at $20 for a tiny kitchen one) and odds are no one else will think of it… unless they’re reading my site, too. They’re also easy to find if you don’t mind asking a store clerk for assistance: most Canadian Tire and other general merchandise stores do sell them, though they may be hidden (hence asking the sales staff — our local Canadian Tire hid them in the back with the sandpaper).

While it’s not usually a good idea to try to fight a large fire by yourself (if a whole room is going, just call the fire department and get out, and not necessarily in that order), smaller fires, especially kitchen ones, can be handled on your own. I remember on the news a month or so ago a story about a woman whose dinner was set ablaze and just lost her head and started screaming in the hallway of her apartment. A man came to help her, putting the fire out by pouring instant pancake mix on it (baking soda would probably work better, since with pancake mix there’s a risk of just having the flour & sugar ignite and making things worse).

One thing that I really want to go to is a short fire safety session the hospital puts on here; hopefully they’ll do it again this summer. It involves hands-on use of a few fire extinguishers: the fire department will light some fires on the hospital lawn and let people put them out. It gives you practice with pulling the pin and aiming, and also gives you a feel for the size of fire you can handle with a fire extinguisher (it’s probably smaller than you might think).

Switching topics, I took a look at an under-development game called Sword of the Stars. It’s a turn-based deep space 4E game (along the same lines as Master of Orion) and it looks like it might be really good. One thing that has really tickled my interest is the concept that different races are really fundamentally different, right down to the way they ply the space lanes. One race gets faster-than-light drives similar to Star Trek’s warp drive: they go anywhere they want in any direction, and are detectable in normal space the whole time. Another uses sub-space lanes, restricting travel to directly one star to another (presumably one star to its next few closest neighbours, preventing you from leapfrogging systems), but while in sub-space is separate from normal space (can’t be ambushed, but also can’t be redirected). Yet another uses a hyperspace gate system similar to that from Babylon 5: while in normal space, they are restricted to slower-than-light travel, but once they make it to one of their gate locations, they can instantly jump to another gate. Sounds like a great concept, and hopefully it’ll follow to a good game. Sadly, I’m reminded of MOO3 which was also a decent concept (we really didn’t need the sub-versions of the popular MOO2 races) involving truly 3D-space and intelligent governors to handle things for you (actually restricting micromanagment, since as the emperor you only have so many ways to split your attention)… that in the end just wasn’t much fun to play.

Wow, I think I’ve just experienced what must be the worst pain in the world (or the worst pain I’ve ever had).

I woke up this morning and everything was hunky-dory… then bam! out of no where I get hit with this huge pain in my back and side. It was so bad I threw up (thankfully I hadn’t eaten since dinner last night). Wayfare was very worried about me, and asked if we should go to the hospital. I said yep, grab your stuff and call a cab. Which gives you an indication of how bad this was — I’m usually a wait and see and don’t bother the healthcare system kinds of guy (see my stroke suspicion below).

So we get to the hospital and we get really lucky, as emerg. is practically empty. I get to see the triage nurse right away, who tells me I probably have a kidney stone. After some more throwing up, they take me back to get an IV hooked up and take my history and stuff. Even more lucky, I got a private room (shortly thereafeter, I’m told emerg filled up, and everyone else got put into those large rooms with curtains dividing them.

Eventually they give me some drugs for the pain, and some gravol for the nausea, at which point I start drifting in and out of consciousness (mostly in, as it still hurt pretty bad with the drugs, just not quite the worst pain in the world). Then I had to go up for an ultrasound. There was a class of kinesiology students there watching me, trying to come up with ways of improving the ergonomics of the system. Unfortunately, they wanted to take an image with a full bladder, which I just couldn’t do, it was hurting and I kept needing to go to the washroom.

Anyhow, in my mind this took about an hour or two, and when they finally got me back down to emerg., I immediately asked if they could let Wayfare in to see me, as I’m sure she was worried sick. Turns out it had taken more like 4 hours and she was about ready to bust the door down and come a looking! (She also managed to read through every magazine they had down there). After that, I spent about another hour in emerg while they wrote me a perscription for codeine, checked my blood pressure a few more times, and went over the ultrasound results.

So right now I’m in a lot of pain and doped up, so a big apology to those who I said I’d meet on the weekend — I’m not going to make it.

As for the rest of you (well, the first group’s included too) I hope you never have to deal with a kidney stone!

Oh, I almost forgot: the thing that made me feel really old was the fact that my doctor was the same age as me. Damn, Doogie!

I miss just sitting down and writing sometimes. I often consider it as a backup profession, since science really really hasn’t been doing so well for me. I might just be able to go off and write, either fiction or as a science reporter or something, if it weren’t for the 15-page brick wall. You see, look through my archives, or worse yet, my hard drive. You’ll find that I almost never finish my longer more-involved stories, despite thinking about them often and playing out different plotlines in my head. They just get to a certain length and that’s it. I even had the same problem with my thesis. I got to about 13 pages in relatively short order (well, not really – I’m a FURIOUSLY slow writer, especially for my thesis), and then just really got bogged down with writer’s block and the like. So I can’t really consider writing as a viable way to make a living if I can’t actually write anything of substantial length.

After all, at 2 cents a word (that was the going rate in 1998 when I published my one and only story for $25) you need to write a lot to make even as much as a grad student.

The website’s been down a long time while I sorted out some issues in real life (c.f.: Thesis), but it’s good to write completely open-ended again. Which is possibly where some of my 15-page issues come from: you get to a point in a story where it can’t go anywhere anymore: you have to bring the threads together and wrap it up. And I’m just lousy at that.

I much prefer writing just train-of-thought, or since I don’t necessarily follow any sort of linear progression most of the time, the off-road vehicle of thought. So it’s good to have the website back.

Oddly enough, I enjoy just writing sometimes. Even when it makes no sense and gets deleted right away. Just writing this has made me realize how incredibly stupid I’ve been lately.

You see, I had this whole thesis thing going, right? And I was feeling some measure of guilt whenever I would write anything else (such as this) while my thesis made no progress. So I made a resolution with myself not to do any work on my website until my thesis was done. But I’m coming to realize that I need to start off getting all the random thought threads out of my head to properly focus on my thesis. Or, at the very least, this doesn’t seem to interfere with the thesis, since for the year I laid off superfluous writing I didn’t make any better progress.

It’s just such a piss-off, since I can churn out a post like this in under an hour. I wrote a 10-page (yes, ten!) introductory guide to curling before the departmental curling fun night, and it took me all of two hours. Two hours would barely buy me 5 sentences in my thesis. Of course, the writing is completely different – this is irrelevant, errant, entropic writing where the main points are to give my fingers something to do and to possibly entertain my miniscule audience, whereas my thesis has to be informative and correct (and referenced).

Remind me to post that curling guide at some point.

So anyhow, that brings us to the bottom of the screen, and this page. As you can see in what was essentially my test post below, I decided to make a blog. It’s essentially what I was doing all along on Blessed by the Potato, only without wearing out the <> keys on my keyboard. It’s hideous at the moment while I learn CSS and whatnot by trial-and-error. I’ve also got to photoshop all my graphics and stuff. I’m also sorting out how to integrate some of the old material into this. Right now I have a front page where you can choose between the old site or the blog; I think soon I’ll integrate the old submenu with the links on the right. I’ll probably ditch a lot of the old subsections (like the science games and model building (Heavy Gear)) and just have the separate rants, advice, and short stories section. I might even get around to converting those to have a style that meshes better with the blog section (or vice-versa).

Hopefully this will be updated somewhat regularly.

Oh, and Rez won the “first” contest. Please, no more.